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After Hiding, He Becomes a Celebrity

Symbol alert! Ali Smith’s new novel opens with a perplexing prologue: a story within a story about a man on an exercise bike whose eyes and mouth are covered by what look like mailbox flaps. A small boy appears, jimmies the flaps off with a dinner knife and instructs the man in how to make a paper airplane. The man complies and discovers that “outside, on its top, it looks like a plain folded piece of paper. Inside, underneath, it is packed tight into itself with surprising neatness like origami, like a small machine.”

The point of those mailbox flaps will become apparent, or semi-apparent, only at the very end of the book, but from the beginning that paper plane serves as an apt emblem of Ms. Smith’s novel. “There but for the” is quirky, intricately put together, sometimes overly clever but nevertheless airborne for some considerable stretches.

The plot borrows a device Ms. Smith, a Scottish author who has been shortlisted for both the Orange and Booker prizes, used in an earlier novel, “The Accidental,” in which a stranger invites herself along on a family’s summer vacation. In the new book a guest at a dinner party in Greenwich, England — a man named Miles Garth — gets up between the main course and dessert and locks himself in an upstairs bedroom, where he remains for months.

His reasons for doing so are never explained, but it’s hard to blame him for wanting to leave the table: some of the other guests are pretty insufferable. There’s a man who brags about the surveillance drones he manufactures, and another, a married man secretly having a homosexual affair, who can’t stop gay bashing.

When word about Miles (or Milo, as he is popularly known) gets out, he becomes a celebrity. Crowds camp out, hoping to sight him at the bedroom window, and they light candles and leave teddy bears. Food vendors and souvenir hawkers turn up, and there are even delegations with banners that say “Milo for Palestine” and “Milo for Israel’s Endangered Children.”

Miles himself, unseen for most of the book, remains a cipher of sorts, and the reader learns about him from four other characters, each of whom appears in a section labeled with one of the words in the book’s title.

Photo

Ali SmithCredit
Sarah Wood

“There” is told from the point of view of Anna Hardie, a social worker who knew Miles years ago when they were part of a group of young people traveling in Europe as a prize for winning a writing contest. “But” is the story of Mark, who was responsible for bringing Miles to the party in the first place: he’s a gay photo researcher mourning an old lover and plagued by his long-dead mother, who speaks to him in rhyme.

“For” takes place inside the very entertaining head of May Young, an elderly woman who, though suffering from dementia, has a sharp and insistent take on things and whose connection to Miles proves both surprising and heartbreaking. And “The” belongs to Brooke Bayoude, a precocious 9-year-old who is a sort of cross between Lewis Carroll’s Alice and one of Salinger’s child savants. Her cleverness is cutesy and annoying at times, verging on preciousness, and yet in her innocence she’s the character who comes closest to understanding Miles.

Brooke, delighted with language and exploring all its possibilities, is a helpless punster. (An artifact becomes an “arty-fact”; the Greenwich Observatory is an “Observe a Tory.”) So is Ms. Smith. Just four pages into “There but for the,” the phrase “to rain blows” turns into “somewhere over the rainblow,” and the whole book is shot through with wordplay — rhymes, puns, literary references, snatches of poetry and pop songs, careful parsings of those four title words — in a way that almost seems tic-like, as if Ms. Smith couldn’t quite help herself.

Yet there is a thematic point to all this showing off, or to most of it, anyway. “There but for the” is ultimately a book about loss and retention: about what we forget and what we remember, about the people who pass through our lives and what bits of them cling to our consciousness.

Anna used to work at a refugee organization she calls the Center for Temporary Permanence, and that, or its reverse — permanent temporariness — is the condition the novel explores in its intricate cross-weaving and careful ellipses. Ms. Smith is brilliant at leaving things out and forcing the reader to make connections, so that, for example, the remaining words of the title phrase (“grace of God go I”) go without saying.

The main web we have for holding experience together, the novel suggests — for recreating a past in the present — is language itself, which in Ms. Smith’s hands seems at times to be arbitrary and insubstantial: the stuff of jokes and puns, the airy lightness that keeps her little construct aloft. Yet language here also proves itself to be dense and referential, capable of making unexpected connections and of imprinting itself feelingly on the mind in a phrase, a rhyme, a snatch of song lyric.

At one point, before the dinner party, Miles and Mark engage in a lengthy discourse about the tiny, almost invisible word “but.” “Is it always but?” Mark asks. “Can it be and?”

Miles replies: “Yeah, but the thing I particularly like about the word but, now that I think about it, is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting.” Much the same could be said of Ms. Smith’s novel, which on its odd and often indirect pathways never fails to repay attention.

THERE BUT FOR THE

By Ali Smith

236 pages. Pantheon Books. $25.

A version of this review appears in print on October 19, 2011, on page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: After Hiding, He Becomes a Celebrity. Today's Paper|Subscribe